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Lost time and the motions of the in-between

Joshua Kane Gomes

Curated by Alain Zedrick Camiling A+ Works of Art, Kuala Lumpur

What happens when a motion is repeated, isolated, and/or amplified? When a sound, whether heard or merely sensed—a drip, a creak, a pulse—lingers longer than it should, what kind of resonance does it leave behind?

Lost time and the motions of the in-between is built around lingering: around moments that don’t quite end, around the tension between movement and stillness, and around presence and absence. It convenes kinetic sculptural configurations of hands, linocut prints, sonic fragments, and a video loop that attune us to the muffled choreography and scenography of the mundane.

Joshua Kane Gomes approaches this as a form of world-building. The world imagined is not a narrative landscape but a temporal one: a visualisation of limbo, of lost time. He describes this like the ocean at night—vast, unknowable, disoriented by the absence of light, and yet not empty. It is through this darkness where waves cannot be seen but can be heard; you feel their pull, which provokes sensations: the splash of water gently kissing the shore, the cool ocean breeze, and the echo of something just beyond reach. It is calm, yet in constant motion, a contradiction that mirrors the emotional terrain of limbo or suspended time.

The exhibition is an inquiry into time’s registers, perhaps one that is at once tactile, auditory, and conceptual. Through works on display, hands are portrayed as predictably spirited, being primary conductors of resonance, holding a piece of driftwood, steering a wheel, notating music, echoing a drip, and devising gestural movements. These are normally unseen, unheard, and unfelt until they are looped, mechanized, and made to speak, carrying affective and sonic charges. In the same lens, the sculptural works in this exhibition don’t just move; they hum with memory, repetition, and dormant emotion, which help us tune into the latent frequencies of the ordinary. For the artist, these function as navigation tools

within uncertain territories, where driftwood forms serve as anchoring points, while kinetic sculptures mark time’s passage through repetitive gestures.

Furthermore, Gomes reflects on the ideas of micro-time and macro-time, something visceral or external, natural or mechanical flow of systems and time. The kinetic sculptures mark time not just with precision, but with feeling. They loop and pulse not like industrial machines, but like breath, or a ritual. In this sense, the exhibition resists productivity, linearity, and resolution. It offers a temporal space that is slow, intimate, and gently disorienting, reinforced by familiar objects and motions.

Works from Lost time and the motions of the in-between are slowed down, repeated, and given life, which accumulate resonance: a flick of a finger becomes a metronome, a held object becomes a weight of memory, and a drip becomes an infinite interval. One is invited to tune in, to participate in this world-building, not to look for meaning, but to feel frequencies, these motions of the in-between where time doesn’t move forward—it ripples. In this space, such resonance becomes a trope to understand how mundane actions, all-toofamiliar materials, and forgotten sounds can vibrate with new intensity when recontextualized.

In Lost time and the motions of the in-between , the everyday is rendered acoustically and spatially expressive, not only through representations of motions of everyday visual cues, but also through mechanisms of attunement to frequencies we might otherwise miss. From the rhythm of droplets from a faucet, the friction of finger taps on wood, and the ghost of a musical phrase before it’s played, among others. Each of the works here is transposed as a resonator, vibrating the threshold between the mechanical and the intimate, the silent and the sonic.

Work descriptions

In Inches & Hours (2024) , Gomes references a Chinese proverb ‘An inch of time is worth an inch of gold. An inch of gold cannot buy an inch of time’ by exploring the tension between micro-time (internal) and macro-time (external) through a leaking faucet and an al -

lusion to the sun. Here, the dripping taps become a marker of micro-time set against the shifting macro-time of daylight. The prints are a set of 12, each showing 4 droplets, which are a nod to the way we split the day into quarters and halves. The video work The Sun is a Lie (2025) is a loop of these prints, where the changing light casts dynamic shadows over the static faucet, echoing the contrast between the unchanging rhythm of the drops and the fluid, rapid passage of external time.

Kinetic sculptures A Record of Lost Time I-IV (2025) are perceived as timekeepers, repeating a subtle, unconscious gesture—gripping, turning, holding—in uniform, all-too-familiar rhythms. The series title is suggestive of non-events, fleeting moments are being accumulated, like a scenography of lost or suspended time. Some of which appear interacting with half-submerged objects in swamps of black liquid similar to the driftwood sculptures in the exhibition, reinforcing the sense of existence between temporal registers of micro-time: internal and rhythmic and macro-time: external and cosmic, perhaps the idea of having one foot in each door.

The series is accompanied by linocut prints titled with musical terms, Prickly Semiquavers (2025), Shrinking Crotchets (2025), Anxious Triplets (2025), Quiet Octaves (2025) , serving as visual scores, generously offering a reading of each movement through tempo, meter, repetition, and which fingers are involved, where the lines between gesture and notation, performance and record, blur. Each of these prints combine specific gestures with a tone or a mood, similar to expressive markings in sheet music like forte or legato.

Regulus (2025), Ankaa (2025), Arcturus (2025), Sirius (2025), and Procyon (2025) all form a constellation where pairs of cast hands, nailed on driftwood, emerge from pools of black liquid. Here, the idea of anchoring, signaling a necessity to physically subject the self within a state of limbo is evoked. For Gomes, the black liquid is like a primordial ooze/tar of memory and time suspended and resolved, that fills the limbo. Some of the sculptures are in double-cast resin, creating a ripple effect, echoing ideas of resonance, where a small gesture can be amplified into temporal memory. These sculptures are all named after navigational stars, reinforcing their functions as markers, having fixed points to orient oneself in a disoriented space, perhaps an in-between.

A Record of Lost Time I (2025)

AC motor, wood, air-dry clay, XPS foam, modelling paste, acrylic paint, steel brackets & fasteners

16(h) x 43 x 52 cm

A Record of Lost Time II (2025)

AC motor, wood, air-dry clay, XPS foam, modelling paste, acrylic paint, fishing line, steel brackets & fasteners

84(h) x 18 x 16 cm

A Record of Lost Time III (2025)

AC motor, wood, air-dry clay, XPS foam, modelling paste, acrylic paint, polymer clay, epoxy resin, fishing line, steel brackets & fasteners

22(h) x 45 x 43 cm

A Record of Lost Time IV (2025)

AC motor, wood, air-dry clay, XPS foam, modelling paste, acrylic paint, epoxy resin, plastic, silicone, teaspoon, steel brackets & fasteners

11(h) x 37 x 26 cm

Air-dry clay, XPS foam, wood, modelling paste, acrylic

paint, polymer clay & epoxy resin

41(h) x 27 x 13 cm

Crux I (2025)

Polaris (2025)

Air-dry clay, XPS foam, wood, modelling paste, acrylic

paint, polymer clay & epoxy resin

29(h) x 39 x 13 cm

Ankaa (2025)

Driftwood, air-dry clay, XPS foam, modelling paste, acrylic paint, epoxy resin, hammer & nails

10(h) x 43 x 47 cm

Driftwood, wood, air-dry clay, XPS foam, modelling paste, acrylic paint, epoxy resin, hammer & nails

15(h) x 62 x 34 cm

Arcturus (2025)

Procyon (2025)

Driftwood,p wood, air-dry clay, XPS foam, modelling paste, acrylic paint, polymer clay, epoxy resin & nails

14(h) x 62 x 45 cm

Regulus (2025)

Driftwood, wood, air-dry clay, XPS foam, modelling paste, acrylic paint, epoxy resin, hammer & nails

13(h) x 62 x 51 cm

18(h) x 67 x 35 cm

Sirius (2025)

Driftwood, wood, air-dry clay, XPS foam, modelling paste, acrylic paint, polymer clay, epoxy resin & nails